Chapter Description

In this lesson, you’ll learn to analyze acquisition data. This will be particularly helpful if you’re an analyst who’s optimizing landing pages or a marketer who’s trying to determine which geographical location to focus your marketing efforts on.

A visitor’s first impression of your site is critical. Landing pages that virtually read the visitor’s mind and anticipate the intent of his visit are almost expected. The acquisition stage of the marketing funnel is about optimizing landing pages to meet the visitor’s needs based on demographic and geographic location.

Task: Define KPIs

First, let us revisit how we set goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). With the focus on acquisition analytics in this session, your business goal may be to increase revenue by 25% for the financial year. Your KPIs will need to correlate to this goal in terms of acquisition metrics. Think backwards—to increase conversion by 25%, how much do you need to increase the traffic to your site by. So when we talk about traffic, you, of course, think in terms of visits, visitors and their traffic sources, and geolocation. Examples of KPIs for acquisition could be:

Average visits per visitor

Average visits per visitor = Total number of visits ÷ Total number of visitors

Assume your business is like Amazon’s, which means you want to optimize this KPI since a visitor will keep coming back to your site and converting.

Unique visitor ratio

Unique visitor ratio = Unique visitor ÷ Total number of visitors

If your website conversion goal is to get visitors to sign up for a newsletter, then your business is very visitor centric. In that case, multiple visits may not be important to you. You would need to optimize for the visitor in this KPI.

New to return visitor ratio

New visitor ratio = Total number of new visitors ÷ Total number of visitors

Return visitor ratio = Total number of return visitors ÷ Total number of visitors

Find out which visitors are the first-time visitors versus those who have been to your site before. If your site has a lot of return customers, you could personalize the content based on the preferences you noted about them earlier.

Average visits from geolocation

Average visits from geolocation = Total number of visits from <North America> ÷ Total number of visits

If you are running a campaign in a specific geolocation, you may look at the ratio of visits your site received before the campaign and after the campaign. Trending this over time will help you evaluate the geolocation of your audience.

Table 4.1 presents a suggested approach to understand which report(s) in SiteCatalyst can help you understand that. Deepen your analysis by looking at the data with multiple metrics and sharpen your insights by segmenting the data. Segments can include any custom traffic variable, any custom conversion variable, and any SiteCatalyst Attribute Importing and Naming Tool (SAINT) classification.

Here are a few suggestions that you can use to segment the conversion; the list is not meant to be exhaustive.

You work in marketing at an online news organization that has paywall logic in place to only let people read a few articles for free until they have to pay. The content is highly specific to a region of the United States. Your business goal is to increase free trials and ultimately paid subscriptions. You have several acquisition KPIs that tie into your business goal:

Average visits per visitor. This could be further segmented by type: anonymous, trial, subscribers. For each user group, how does their visit frequency trend over time?

Visits by region segmented by type. Trended over time, are you meeting your growth goals by region?

New visits by traffic source. What traffic sources are bringing in your new readers?